The Price of Good Taste

The high cost of food is the topic du jour. Global growth, bad weather, the failure of production to keep up with growing demand, high energy costs, and investors flooding into the markets are creating a food crisis (Check out the Washington Post's fine series). It's having a serious impact on the world's poorest, who devote a disproportionate share of their income to food. And it's taking a heavy toll on another class, much less deserving of our sympathy, who also devote a disproportionate share of their income to food: food snobs.

You surely know some food snobs. You may even be one. (I am.) We food snobs buy dried Italian pasta rather than Mueller macaroni, artisanal fizzy lemonade from France, not Hi-C. And then we prattle on about it, ad nauseam. Of course, our organic, imported, steel-cut, Meyer-lemon products taste better than their domestic, industrially-processed analogues. But they're also important cultural markers. The foods we buy signal to others that we don't just subscribe to Gourmet, we ingest its message of seeking out the finest ingredients. Food snobs know that food isn't simply fuel to get you through the day: It's an expression of taste, refinement, and global consciousness. And thanks to the expansion of trade, the construction of super-efficient supply chains, and the Internet, the opportunities for being precious about food have never been greater.

Alas, the cost of being precious about food has also never been greater. Despite the vast advances in American food culture, the finest ingredients frequently must travel a great distance to arrive at your local Whole Foods: wines from Europe, California, and South America, Moroccan harissa and Thai fish sauce, South African guava juice, and pistachios from Turkey and Iran (I know a place). The best smoked salmon-the only one that will darken a bagel in my house-arrives on the banks of the Hudson from distant Scotland, not nearby Nova Scotia.

But with the dollar weakening, commodity prices rising, and energy costs (and hence transportation costs) soaring, the food snob's dollar doesn't fund nearly as many courses today as it did a year ago. At my local cheese shop, the Etorki, a delightful Basque sheep's milk cheese (from France's Basque region, mind you, not Spain's. What, you don't know about France's Basque cheeses? Really?) now tips the scales at $22 a pound, up from $18 a pound a year ago. Eli's raisin crisps, perfect for holding the Basque cheese, have risen from $6.86 to $8.35. If you want to assemble an authentic Italian appetizer of prosciutto and melon, it'll cost you uno braccio e una gamba. At Balducci's this week, prosciutto di parma was $21.99 a pound while Tuscan melons ran $4.49)

For the truly wealthy, the gourmet inflation isn't a big deal. Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group has likely not cut back on his consumption of $40 stone crab claws. But most food snobs aren't really rich. (I'd wager a pound of truffles that most of the members of the Forbes 400 don't know the difference between jamon Iberico and Oscar Mayer. And nowhere are the wine snobs more insufferable than in the comparatively low-income, tweedy precincts of university humanities departments.) For those for whom money remains an object—which is to say most of us—the rising prices present a series of tough choices.

Some are trading down. Gourmands who swore by New York Strip are now singing the praises of the more quotidian hanger steak. At dinner the other night at an Italian restaurant, I noticed two couples ardently extolling the praises of the bottle of two-buck-chuck they had brought. Over the weekend, as we sat in a well-appointed kitchen of a double-income family whose annual earnings run deep into the six figures, our host proclaimed, with exasperation, that $4 for a dozen organic eggs was simply too much. She was switching back to conventional eggs, chemicals be damned.